Debunking the Social Media Barriers
PRWeek recently released the results of their CEO Survey. While the majority of those surveyed planned on using WOM and digital more this year, when asked “How likely is your company to use social media to communicate with stakeholder groups in the next 12 months?” 44% still said they would probably/definitely not use it. In fact, the survey also pointed out that only 18% had used social media to communicate with stakeholders in the past. This number is growing obviously when you compare these two stats and also reflect on the fact that 63% agreed that social media outreach can be very/somewhat effective as a corporate communications tool and that around 61% feel that social media can have a very large impact on a company’s over all reputation.
But what of those 44% that are still stubbornly holding on to old views and not embracing the potential that social media provides? Well, PRWeek asked them what they considered to be the most serious barriers holding them back from participating in social media. I thought I’d share these perceived barriers below and give you my take on why I think these barriers should not pose a stumbling block for those companies by debunking each one of them.
Social Media Barriers*
Results: 44.5% said they’d consider it lack of relevance to target stakeholder groups
Debunked: Yes, can see why people might answer this way. They could be seeing that the number of conversations online about certain topic is low. Or perhaps the number of people based on certain age groups could be relatively small for their product target markets. However, if social media conversations are the “cause” then consider the “effect” – being what shows up when you google your product or your product category. Search engines love the fresh content social media serves up and as a result social media posts, tweets, pics, videos all can end up in key shelf space on the first page of a Google search. And what most of you can agree on is that almost all stakeholders use search as one of the primary ways to find and research products they want to buy. So, while a large part of your audience may not be participating in social media it only takes a small but influencial portion of it to comment on your brand in social media and seriously impact your brand’s search results. If you aren’t part of those conversations and are not building relationships with those that are talking about your brand in social media then you are rolling the dice on your search results.
Results: 37% said they are concerned about losing control of the message
Debunked: I hate to be the one to break the bad news but you never did control the message. Sure in the “good old days” the amount of “water cooler” brand discussion was isolated and didn’t spread very far or quickly thus appearing like you could control it. In fact, with the advent of easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and social networks not only can every Joe Citizen publish their opinions easily but they spread fast and they are permanently cached for all time and indexed on your favorite search engine. Search engines don’t care where they content on a brand comes from just that they find it and aggregate it together for those interested in it. You can always “control the message” on the properties you own but with the sheer volume of consumer generated content out there (and it’s growing) you have less and less of a percentage of the total aggregated brand story. And since you can never “control” what others write about you the best you can do is to join their conversations and develop genuine relationships with them and hope for the best.
Results: 28.% said they were concerned about return on investment (ROI)
Debunked: Yes, those of us in the social media field need to find some formulas and equations that we can all agree on but consider this: traditional media has lots of calculations.. but for what – eyeballs? impressions? clickthroughs? And how do these actually translate to the bottom line of a company? Well, for a formal translation, there’s nothing I know of. Now, if you picture the lead funnel, all of these traditional media metrics lie up in the top, wider end of the funnel, far away from the final relationships with customers. So what of metrics in social media? Well, they revolve around the narrower end of the funnel, near the bottom and very close to customers. Social media is about building relationships, plain and simple, be it partners, influencers, fans, advocates, future customers, or current buying customers. It’s not about lots of eyeballs it’s about the right set of eyeballs. As such the numbers are smaller, as they should be, because they are in the narrow part of the funnel and closer to the customer. Wouldn’t you rather be talking about metrics that are easier to tie to actual sales?
Results: 22.5% said they were concerned about lack of knowledge and capability within the company
Debunked: This is a valid concern for most companies because indeed the role is a bit of a hybrid between a PR professional and a customer service expert. However, both of those departments would probably already have individuals who are knee deep in social networking and would understand how to apply their jobs to the new frontier. As well, I know of over 200 firms, agencies willing to help and companies willing to share their best practices, that have already developed a large amount of knowledge in social media. You could reach out to them, they’d love to help.
Results: 19% said they were concerned about the lack of knowledge and capability within the public relations, advertising, and/or other marketing agencies the company works with
Debunked: While I would say this may have been a concern a year ago, I have personally seen a major uptick in the amount of agencies now offering social media related services. So, as I mentioned above I know of approximately 200 companies offering social media services and many more on the cusp of doing so. And if the firm you use clearly doesn’t want to go down that path then you know there are plenty more firms out their that probably would.
So with 67% of those surveyed saying they plan on spending “much more” on digital marketing in 2009 hopefully I helped in debunking some of the issues they may have had holding them back. The economic times are causing a market disruption. As with any distruption you can decide to shrink and hold on or expand the take the market share of those who are shrinking. The choice is yours and employing social media could be the best way to get there.
* taken from The PRWeek CEO Survey conducted by PRWeek and Millward Brown using the ERI panel. E-mail notification was sent to approximately 53,180 corporate professionals and a total of 200 CEOs completed the survey online between September 24 and September 29, 2008.
November 17th, 2008 - Posted in public relations, social media | | 15 Comments
on November 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
“19% said they were concerned about the lack of knowledge and capability within the public relations, advertising, and/or other marketing agencies the company works with”
Well they better find new jobs then, aye? Social media is a huge part of new marketing, and if they’re not on top of it then they’re going to be in trouble.
on November 17th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Let me know if you have trouble commenting on this post. I’m posting a comment here to test it.
on November 17th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Bravo. My favorite debunking is the control issue.
People are talking about your company online, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. And in fact, social media engagement offers a brand MORE control, not less.
If you create a series of outposts (FB, Twitter, etc.) that the brand controls, and customers post negative sentiments, then the brand can respond/correct, delete, take down the forum, and a whole host of other options.
If you don’t engage in social media and customers post negative sentiments on their own blog or some other forum that is not owned/controlled by the brand, then that brand has zero chance of really doing anything about it.
on November 17th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Amanda, thanks for your comment. I agree, social media is a necessary leg of the stool every marketing strategy needs to have. All agencies should be addressing it in an integrated way for sure.
Jason, great to hear from you. Totally agree with your comments – you are speaking my language.
on November 17th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Great point on “control” of the message. That is a key point for CEOs to get. You can’t control, you can influence. If that doesn’t make sense, they might ask our president-elect how it works.
Seems to me another big issue that these stats represent is “toe-in-the-water” syndrome. In other words, I think there is a benefit to social media but I’m only going to put my toe in the water and do a little here and bit there until SM becomes more mainstream or because I feel like we don’t completey understand it.
Two points to make on that note…
1) Toe-in-the-water never works. Just ask Motrin, whose lack of response on prominent SM communities shows it’s YouTube viral video was just the company testing the waters.
2) SM is mainstream. 1 billion tweets. Millions on Facebook. 1 billion YouTube videos streamed daily. I’d call that mainstream.
on November 18th, 2008 at 12:49 am
Awesome stuff Justin. Your right that so many see social media as this sideline project when embracing it means transforming to the core how you market “with” your customers.
on November 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Outstanding article, great response to the PR article.
Reports such as these reflect a sentiment of “mixed feelings” by CEO’s relative to PR, Marketing and Social Media. The sentiments may change as the economy continues to put pressure on capital, resources and revenue growth. The current market dynamics may in fact shift significantly as the rippling effect of the economic downturn forces CEO’s to look for more effective alternative to reach their markets at lower cost.
Business Week Reports: Burson-Marsteller thinks CEOs should be more social. In the press release on the findings, Mark J. Penn President & CEO says “CEOs should understand that many of their stakeholders are active users of social media and that it can be an extremely effective means for communicating a message. I would argue that companies that are not engaging in social media are taking a bigger risk than the companies that are.”
on November 18th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Great points Jay. I agree most of us in the social media space know its the most effective way to go however there is still the unfortunately possibility that some CEO’s make think social media is “experimental” vs. “fundamental”. I hope, for their sake, they choose the latter.
on November 18th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for the recap, especially for those who don’t have a pd subscription to PRWeek. Wonder what the respondents would say about the impact social media had halting a F-500 company’s marketing company; specifically Motrin’s experience this week.
on November 18th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Nice piece David!
Re: your ROI statements, totally agree that SM participation seems to indicate consumers are further down the funnel but I’d be interested to hear more of your reasoning about why that interaction is easier to tie to sales (or other business data).
Is it simply because it represents a more tightly focused “focus group?”
on November 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Thanks for tackling this, David.
We hear objections like this, and others, time and time again from some clients.
Top issues (as noted here):
- Relevance to audience => we have heard this quite bit from organizations, who base their opinions on anecdotal evidence. When we examine secondary research, or conduct primary research, we always find the opposite is true of their initial beliefs. They are usually surprised how connected their audience actually is.
- Control of the message => this has not been true since before the peasants yelled “The king Is A Fink”.
- ROI => We hear this a lot, too. Measurement is something we are also highly interested in, because we (quite frankly) do not like or trust anecdotal evidence. The interesting thing about ROI and social media, however, is that laggards are demanding greater ROI criteria for social media, but have made traditional means exempt from the same diligence. How many companies spend weeks in meetings deciding upon company colours and logo/wordmarks? What’s the ROI of that?
Similarly, the (real) cost of producing many types of traditional content to be distributed in expensive traditional channels is somehow acceptable, compared to providing some type of resource to using what are pervasively free tools.
The mind boggles. When evaluating social media, use objective criteria and real data.
on November 18th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Thanks for the continuing discussion.
Toby – yes Motrin is a prime example of a company that hopefully now knows the need for listening and embracing social media.
Rob – Ironically I saw a great comparison of Sales 1.0 to Sales 2.0 in of all places a “Book for Dummies” booklet on Sales 2.0 The one difference that really resonated was: 1.0 = mass prospecting vs. 2.0 = network/community of unlimited opportunities. The other aspect of listening to social media is for the point of need and then reaching out to help. I basically think the tie between building relationships and the possibility of those relationships becoming customers someday is much shorter and thus easier to quantify.
John – great addition points. And yes, totally agree with your point on how companies have become quite comfortable with not demanding strict ROI from traditional media projects while creating a double standard with what they’d expect from social media. The great news is that social media ROI can be tracked a lot closer to sales than most, if not all, traditional media campaigns.
on November 18th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
There seems to be something of a disconnect here. CEOs of PR companies might be hesitant about PR on so many different levels but their clients certainly aren’t. Now what can I quote you to prove my point – Peter Kim’s list of US companies ALREADY using social media, the INC 500 survey back in August, the Fortune 500 survey in September….?
on November 18th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
David:
Thanks for the mention in your tweet. I hope you don’t mind but I anted to share a free eBook we just released that addresses some of the issues discussed in this thread.
Free eBook: Socialutions: Management Methods for the Social Era. Feedback welcome, Thanks
get it here: http://apps.drawloop.com/published/12323#main
on November 18th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
John W. – excellent point and yes Peter has pulled together a great list of companies for others to model after. The evidence is definitely mounting that most companies would find hard to ignore.
Jay – thanks for sharing the link. Wow, 111 pages, that’s a lot of work there. Just skimmed it for now but looks like bunch of great material.